India besieged by muslim jihadists, both foreign and domestic

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Grim news for India, thanks in part to “ally” Pakistan, and Saudi Barbaria.

India Under Islamist Threat

The resignation last week of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf is going to have an impact on Islamabad’s Indian neighbor, but whether that impact will be positive or negative remains to be seen.Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency’s alleged involvement in terror attacks against Indian targets may continue unabated. On July 25, five successive blasts occurred in India’s technological capital Bangalore, killing one person and wounding 15. The next day, 17 back-to-back explosions took place in Ahmadabad and then two more attacks occurred in the very hospitals where the injured were brought to. As a result, 49 people died and more than 200 were wounded.

These latest terror attacks unfortunately confirm that India is a target of Islamist groups: from January 2004 to March 2007, 3,674 people died in terrorist attacks in India.

A little-known outfit called the Indian Mujahedeen (IM) claimed responsibility for the Ahmadabad terror attacks.

According to Indian intelligence officials, members of the IM are militants from banned terror groups such as the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), the Harkat ul-Jihad al-Islami (HUJI), and al-Qaida affiliate Pakistan-based Lashkar e Toiba (LeT). These groups closely cooperate: for instance LeT could provide the funds while SIMI takes care of the logistical support, and so forth.

The connection between IM and SIMI could not be clearer: in their email to authorities IM demands the release of SIMI militants held in prison for terror charges.

For the time being, the Islamist extremist cells are still isolated from each other and one cannot really talk about a network. Yet an increase in the number of incidents — in Delhi alone, 75 incidents implicating Islamist groups were counted between 2004 and 2006 — coupled with more and more frequent seizures of weapons and explosives prove an increasing and worrisome activity among militants.

Two countries have been behind the radicalization of some in the Indian Muslim community: Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

The radicalization of the Indian Muslim youth started in the late 1980s when scores of young Muslims from Jammu and Kashmir traveled to Pakistan to be trained and armed by the ISI.

For instance, SIMI was founded in 1977, but really took off after the destruction of the mosque in Ajodhya on Dec. 6, 1992. SIMI, banned in 2001, was largely financed by Saudi Arabia. It had relations with Islamist organizations in Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Gulf countries. Some of its leaders in Saudi Arabia in the 1990s recruited militants from among the thousands of Indian Muslims living there. Active in several Indian states, the SIMI has not hidden its admiration for Bin Laden. In all the recent terror attacks, the Indian police implicated ex-SIMI members whom they accuse of either having helped operatives coming from Pakistan or having trained there.